Category Archives: PDC Members

Renewing my membership in the Public Diplomacy Council just got easier. Responding to our President’s reminder message last Sunday, I followed his link to our Membership page, clicked on its “Add to Cart” button, and paid my 2019 annual dues with my Amex card in about 90 seconds. (Just got the receipt via email.) Council…

Nontraditional U.S. Public Diplomacy: Past, Present, and Future, edited by Deborah L. Trent, Ph.D., originally published by the Public Diplomacy Council in 2016, is now available online. Soon after 9/11, the late Representative Henry Hyde, Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, saw something was awry in America’s Public Diplomacy. “Few would assert,” he said,…

Many Council members carry on our fascination with public diplomacy years after retiring from active duty. Do you ever wonder how different the business is today? Take a look at our new notes page for Lunch and Learn meetings, sponsored by the Council for PD practitioners. Two Foreign Service Officers, Melissa Quartell and Frankie Sturm,…

As a consequence of President Eisenhower’s historic 1953 UN General Assembly speech, “Atomic Power for Peace’” the world-wide promotion of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy became the young U.S. Information Agency’s first major mission. I had been managing a U.S. Mission-sponsored Atoms-for-Peace exhibition at the Berlin Industrial Fair. It included a huge replica of…

Imagine spending 12 percent of the entire U.S. budget to help displaced and mostly impoverished Middle East, African and Afghan refugees to rebuild their lives? The Marshall Plan of 1947 did just that for war-torn postwar Europe. It was an indispensable helping hand for an entire generation recovering from devastation and dislocation after World War II. The…

In recent years, over 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change, and war in the greatest human displacement since World War II. A sense of that mass migration is depicted in Human Flow, a film epic created by the internationally renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei…

By Donald M. Bishop – The death, earlier this year, of Michael Novak — philosopher, journalist, and diplomat committed to Public Diplomacy and international broadcasting – reminded me of an extraordinary five days I spent with him in Bangladesh in 1995. Here are some memories of his visit — and insights for Public Diplomacy. In…